Essorant wrote:Thanks very much for sharing that. It seems a shame that a Latin translation of Homer be so hidden away.

It isn't, and this question has been raised and answered here before now. It's too bad that Textkit doesn't have a forum search function that would have found the thread. (I'd be happy to be corrected if such a function exists).

Samuel Clarke's ad verbum translation is easily available via Google Books. Type in Ilias Homeri Latine (or just search for Samuel Clarke) and you'll find it. There's more than one PDF available, so check out the different editions for the best typeface.

Clarke also translated the Odyssey. Many other classics in Graece et Latine are available from Google Books.

Lucus: Of course we'll probably never see Andronicus's work, but Andreas Divus's translation is still in the world. A pity that no-one has put it up on Google Books, it was an influential text for Ezra Pound.

Pound related that he found a copy of Divus's translation of the Odyssey at a bookstall in Paris in the early part of the 20th century. IIRC that translation dates from the 1500s, but I'm not positive about that date.

Pound's first Canto is a fair translation of Divus's translation, done in a style reminiscent of the Anglo-Saxon poem, The Seafarer

I am currently transcribing the Didot-editions (not to everybody's liking, but I enjoy reading it) of Homer's "Iliad" (finished transcribing, currently proofreading) and the "Odyssey" (currently transcribing).

The most interesting might be Cicero’s Aratea, a translation of Aratus; both in hexameters. There’s another translation of Aratus’ poem made a few decades later by a certain Germanicus Caesar. Cicero also translated other verse in his philosophical works, e.g. a passage of Sophocles’ Trachiniae.CAtullus 51 is a translation of a wellknown poem of Sappho's, in the same lyric meter, and Cat.61 translates a partially preserved poem by Callimachus, in elegiacs.Phaedrus (1st cent.) translated Aesop fables into Latin iambics, and there are prose versions. And there’s a Latin translation of a version of the so-called Life of Aesop, an interesting text.

Before Jerome, word-for-word translations were generally (and rightly) looked down on as being false to the spirit and sense of the original.